Connections User Conference

Coupons Boost Email Response Rates

Thursday, November 19, 2009 by Joel Book

Retailers and consumer packaged goods marketers that include coupons in consumer email communications are experiencing higher open and click-through rates.

As reported in the November 19th eMarketer Daily Newsletter, “There is a pronounced difference between open rates for e-mails that include a coupon offer and those that do not. Open rates of around 24% to 25% for coupon e-mails dropped to just 16% to 18% for non-coupon campaigns.”

Open Rates for Coupon Offers vs. Other Mailings

The eMarketer article also confirms that “Higher open rates for coupon offers translated into higher click rates as well, though the difference was much smaller. emails with coupons that could be used online were most likely to be clicked, at 4%.”

Click Rates for Coupon Offers vs. Other Mailings in the US

As coupon use expands, I believe those brands that are able to personalize offers to the product needs and purchase behavior of individual consumers will have a distinct advantage over those brands that practice a “one-size-fits-all” coupon strategy. To learn more about technology that enables marketers to deliver relevant and timely offers – including coupons -- based on email subscriber data and behavior, check out ExactTarget Live Offers at ExactTarget.com

What About Mobile Coupons?

Are mobile coupons ready for prime time? Not quite, but we’re getting there fast – really fast. According to a recent Mobile Marketing Survey of 511 consumers by HipCricket, 83% of US consumers say their favorite brand has yet to market to them via their mobile phone, even though 37% say they would be interested in participating in a mobile customer loyalty program from a brand they trust.

This indicates growing consumer interest in mobile marketing and represents a significant -- but largely untapped -- opportunity for brands to connect with customers on mobile devices. “With consumer interest in mobile marketing continuing to steadily increase, it’s clear that now is the time for brands to launch and execute their mobile strategy and programs,” said Scott Debson, HipCricket’s VP of brand solutions.

It seems that brands are starting to listen. Ten million digital coupons were redeemed in the first six months of 2009, up 25% from a year ago, according to Inmar, a coupon-processing company. But they still account for less than half a percent of all coupons distributed.

Top Tips for Using Mobile Coupons

If you’re looking for practical insight on how to use mobile coupons effectively, check back here to see my next post, “Five tips for using Mobile Coupons to Drive in-store Traffic.”

It's Catapult Season

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Teresa Becker

The leaves are changing, the air is getting colder, and the Angel Trees have been hung by the elevators. So what does all of that mean? You guessed it... time for new Catapults to start their adventure with ExactTarget - and we couldn't be more excited!

The last couple of months we've had the opportunity to talk to hundreds of candidates at schools and events across the state of Indiana. They all have one thing in common - the potential to be the newest class of young employees at one of the most respected 1 to 1 Email Marketing companies in the nation.

As Finalist Day quickly approaches, we're excited to meet all of the potential candidates - good luck from the current Catapult Class of 2009!

Real Email Threat #3: Lax Permission

Tuesday, November 3, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

The issue of permission presents one of the greatest threats to the future of email marketing. According to data shared by Julie Katz at Connections ’09, consumers want greater control over email. They want control over SPAM, they want to be able to unsubscribe from email more easily, and they want greater control over the frequency of commercial email coming to their inboxes.

In both 2008 and 2009 we asked consumers to indicate how acceptable it was for them to be contacted via email for “Promotional messages (i.e., sale, special offers) from companies whom you regularly conduct business, but have not specifically asked for ongoing information.” As we outlined in the 2009 Channel Preference Study, consumers’ attitude toward non-permission communications from known companies is souring quickly. In 2009, 50% of consumers considered these messages with unacceptable, nearly doubled from 26% in 2008. The belief that marketers can send email to their customers based on a ‘prior existing relationship’—the premise for email appends—is dead. Customers don’t want the practice to continue.

Nevertheless, the industry continues to allow embarrassing practices like email appending and list rental. Not surprisingly, the only people that fully endorse these practices are those that profit directly from them. The rest of us squirm and manage to squeak out the words, “It can work, if you do it right.” However, few believe that it ever will be done right on a consistent basis. After all, we've been writing about this for quite a while.

There are three interrelated reasons for this. First, as I mentioned in my first post in this series, email is too easy and too cheap. It’s simply easier to do email appends and list rental incorrectly, using an opt-out model that has no regard for permission. The numbers are more impressive--and let's face it, big lists still sound better than little ones. Second, pricing models are still based on match rates and list sizes. These models favor sending to the masses, which in turn favor the opt-out model. Third, since there are still enough suckers out there who will pay to do it incorrectly, email append and list rental vendors have no incentive to change their revenue model. Given that opt-in revenue models are likely to be less lucrative, it won't change until the issue is forced.

But it may already be too late for email append and list rental companies.

While the industry has failed to police itself, two entities with the ability to make real changes have lined up with consumers. First, ISPs continue to serve the best interests of their customers by increasingly relying on reputation systems that include engagement measures such as opens and clicks to determine if messages should be routed to the spam folder (see What’s in store at the ISPs 2009-2010 from Pivotal Veracity). Second, Canadian Parliament continues to push forward Canadian Electronic Commerce Protection Bill C-27 which mandates an opt-in standard.

Comparatively, US CAN-SPAM laws are notoriously weak, making the joke that US CAN-SPAM laws say, “yes, you can spam consumers so long as they can opt-out.” Unfortunately, Unfortunately, many companies use this law to condone their continued distribution of non-permission email. In short, the US Law falls short of meeting customer expectations—again more than half of consumers believe non-permission email is unacceptable, even when it's from a known company. This doesn’t support an opt-out standard. I interpret this as, “there is no excuse for sending email without the express consent of consumers. Period.”

Interestingly, in the same comparison of opt-in promotions from 2008 to 2009, there was no change. Consumers believe permission-based email is highly acceptable. In fact, given the choice, 75% of US consumers (see the 2009 Channel Preferences Study) and 74% of UK consumers (see Strategy Meets Customer Expectations) prefer to receive permission based promotional messages through email.

It’s simply that we need to draw a hard and fast line. Opt-in permission should be the only standard by which we live. Not supporting efforts to eliminate questionable practices in our industry reflects poorly on the industry as a whole. After all, as Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath, recently wrote, “What's good for consumers is great for direct marketers. Marketing is not what it used to be, the lines between good and bad actors have been blurred, and the consumer is now in charge.” Amen!

It's time we completely honor consumers' preference for an opt-in standard. We can no longer afford to lend any support, even passively through silence, those who don't.

I'm Honored

Monday, November 2, 2009 by Joel Book

Vote for the Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management in 2009

I am really honored to have been nominated as one of the Most Influential People in Sales Lead Management in 2009 and would sincerely appreciate your vote.

When I was notified about my nomination last week by Jim Obermayer, Executive Director of the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA), I was humbled because the list of nominees includes so many of the top professionals in our industry – including ExactTarget’s CEO, Scott Dorsey.

Voting is open until November 13th. Both SLMA members and non-members can vote for up to five nominees. You can view a full list of finalists here.

Taco John’s and Scotts Highlight MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer

The recent MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer conference in Chicago attracted more than 300 interactive marketing professionals and was a huge success. Congratulations to Anne Handley and her team for producing a first-rate event.

Among the conference speakers were Renee Middleton of Taco John’s and Kip Edwardson of Scotts. Both joined me in presenting a special session to a standing-room-only audience titled, “Email, Social and Mobile. The New Triangle Offense of 1to1 Marketing.” Renee and Kip are on the cutting edge of one-to-one marketing, and discussed how they are using email in combination with social networks and SMS text messaging to attract consumers to their websites, convert them to email subscribers, and use email to drive consumers to retail stores. What they are doing – and the results they are achieving – serves as a great example of what’s possible when you match the right strategy to the right technology.

If you were not able to attend the conference, and would like to get a copy of our presentation, leave a note in the comments and we'll get you a copy!

Real Email Threats #1 – It's Too Easy and Too Cheap

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

Last week I addressed several misperceptions about the future of email and provided a list of recent statistics showing that the future of email looks bright. I also mentioned that there are real threats to the future of email.

I had the honor of moderating a panel at Connections titled “Research Survey Says!” On the panel were three of the smartest folks one could have the pleasure of working with: Julie Katz from Forrester, Rebecca Lieb from eConsultancy, and Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa. With the assignment of presenting “relevant research” and a stacked deck of panelists, my job was simply not to mess it up. My strategy? Leave the topic really loose. I asked two simply questions, “What are the perceived threats to email?” and “What are the real threats to email?”

To my surprise, there was nearly unanimous consensus about the real challenges facing email. In summary, email is so easy and so cheap that even when used ineffectively, it still gets results. And that is a big, big problem since it makes it easy to send bad email.

According to research shared by Stefan Tornquist, email programs that do not follow best practices (e.g., batch-and-blast) are becoming less and less effective. In fact, these programs were half as effective in 2008 as they were in 2002. In contrast, programs that do follow best practices (e.g., segmentation, personalization) are slightly more effective today than they were five years ago.

While email experts have been talking about relevance for a long time, I have not seen it presented in a way that makes it this clear. It is not enough to send email. It is imperative for marketers to deliver authentic value to subscribers--and that is not easy!

This point is further supported by consumer-oriented research:

58% of consumers say the primary reason they unsubscribed or simply stopped reading emails from businesses is because “emails were not relevant to me,” followed by 44% who said they “Received too many emails from the sender” (MarketingSherpa, Consumer Media Survey, Sept 2008)
54% say most of the email ads they receive don’t offer them anything of interest (Forrester, “Winning Email Subscribers in a Down Economy” Dec 2008)

Earlier this year, I asked a professional triathelete to coach me in preparation for a half-marathon (we'll see how that goes before I sign up for a full marathon). In that time I have learned that while nearly everyone can run, the majority of people do not run well. I find myself cringing at the sight of people clodding around my neighborhood and placing unnecessary stress on their feet and knees. Only six months ago, that was me.

Email marketing is similar. Since nearly everyone who tries it sees some degree of success, many mistakenly believe they have it figured out. "Why bother with all that stuff the 'experts' preach?" Because if you don't listen and apply what they say, your glory days are behind you. Your email program will grow less and less effective. It's all downhill from here.

This does not need to be the case. The success of your program is in your control. Commit your program to constant and never-ending improvement. Keep learning. Keep modifying. Keep delivering content your subscribers find valuable (not what you think is valuable). Do this and the value derived from your email program will continue to grow.

Real vs. Perceived Threats to Email: Part 1 - Addressing Misperceptions

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

The now infamous Wall Street Journal article announcing the death of email sparked a fire in the bellies of email marketers and social media gurus alike. The overwhelming response is that social media is not posing a significant threat to email. To date, all the signs seem to indicate that these two channels will continue to evolve together.

True, there are dissenting voices. However, I have found none that are backed by credible statistical data. Since there is no statistical validity in personal anecdotes, I don’t care (except for the value they provide in forming hypotheses to be tested in future research). I care about what well-founded research tells us about the world at large.

Here is a list of the data sources I have located that reveal the truth about the current state of email use and email marketing:

Pew Internet & American Life: Online Activities Trends

79% of Americans use the Internet
90% of online Americans use email, making it the most popular online activity
57% of Americans check email daily

MarketingSherpa

78% of users email friends a link to information they wish to share with friends over the internet.
22% share through social media
MarketingSherpa’s research directly contradicts research released earlier this year from AddToAny, which suggested people share information twice as often through Facebook as they do through email. However, there were serious issues with the AddToAny research.

USC Annenberg Digital Future Report

How Many Americans Are Using E-mail? -- Almost everyone who goes online uses e-mail (97 percent of all Internet users).
Regular Contact by E-mail -- E-mail users maintain weekly personal e-mail contact with an average of seven people in the current study, down from the peak of nine in 2006. Forty-nine percent of e-mail users said they maintain personal contact by e-mail on a weekly basis with five or more people.

Participatory Marketing Network

Email (26 percent) and text messaging (26 percent) are the activities least likely to be "given up for a week," followed by TV (15 percent), talking on phone (11 percent), visiting social networks (nine percent), reading magazines (seven percent) and visiting non social network sites (six percent).

Pontifelx / Harris Interactive Survey

96% of online adults who have actually taken the step of providing brands personal information have shared their email addresses with marketers
12% of online adults have been willing to share information like their Facebook user name or their Twitter handle with a brand in exchange for information or promotional offers

SmartBreif on Social Media

While not nationally representative, this poll is interesting in that is suggests even social media professionals are not significantly curtailing their use of email.

59% of SmartBreif on Social Media readers (likely to have a heavy disposition toward social media use) report their use of email has stayed about the same despite the growth of social networks.
28% are using slightly less often
11% are using more often
2% of these readers rarely use email

ExactTarget – Is Email Marketing Endangered?

We asked a question similar to the SmartBreif poll, however, the question excludes marketers—so it is a better representation of the population at large.

Net 25% of online consumers report using social networks more often over the past 6 months (42% using more often, 17% using less often)
Net 23% of online consumers report using email more often over the past 6 months (29% using more often, 6% using less often)
Net 21% of online consumers report using text messaging more often over the past 6 months (38% using more often, 17% using less often)
71% of smartphone owners report sending more PERSONAL email on their smartphones than BUSINESS related email—it’s not all business.

ExactTarget – 2009 Channel Preferences Study

57% of online consumers use email most often to send written messages to their friends, over text messaging (24%) and social networks (10%)
75% of online consumers prefer to receive permission-based promotional messages through email—up 3.6% from 2008—followed by 17% who prefer direct mail promotions and 4% who prefer text promotions.
More than half of online consumers have made a purchase as the direct result of and email message they received, more than any other online communication channel.

Forrester Consulting – Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power

34% of marketers believe email will become more effective over the next two years, 19% believe it will be less effective
Asked why marketers believe email will be more effective:
- 74% believe their email communications are getting more relevant
- 58% see email as an integral part of their multichannel activities
- 44% believe customers prefer email as a marketing channel

That is not to say there are not threats to the future success of email. Stay tuned for part two where I share insights from a panel I moderated at Connections last week where Julie Katz from Forrester, Rebecca Lieb from eConsultancy, and Stefan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa were asked to share their takes on the real versus perceived threats to email marketing.

Is Mobile Email Driving Consumers to a Disappointing Experience?

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 by Morgan Stewart

As outlined in our recent whitepaper, Is Email Marketing Endangered?, Smartphones are a major force behind consumers increasing consumption of email. As such, the importance of mobile email for email marketers will continue to increase. While the solutions remain less than ideal, Mark Brownlow has done a wonderful job of summarizing the challenges of mobile email and linking to useful resources on the topic.

But getting mobile email to work is only the first step. Assuming your email is successful in getting consumers to your site, they need to be able to actually do something. This appears to be a challenge. According to new research from Equation Research commissioned by Gomez Inc., end users are disappointed with their mobile web experience.

Among findings of the report:

60% of consumers have encountered a problem when accessing a website from their mobile phone during the past 12 months

The number one reason cited was slow load times (73%). There are a number of factors that may impact load times that are out of marketers’ control. However, the other top reasons are all things that marketers should be able to test and rectify:

* 51% experienced errors or crashes on the mobile site

* 48% said formatting of the mobile site made it difficult to use
* 45% had issues with the site functioning as expected

Among common formatting errors, the study identified content that is too large or too small for the screen, links that do not work, and overlapping or illegible text and graphics.

Poor mobile experiences impact brand perception

Consumers have high expectations of mobile sites—they should load quickly, look good, and function properly. The consequences of not meeting these expectations are also high. While it makes sense that consumers would be less likely to visit the site again (61%) and that they would visit a competitors site (40%), the negative impact on the brand at large is more alarming:

* 23% would be less likely to purchase from that company
* 19% would have a negative overall impression of the company
* 18% would be less likely to go to the company’s website on their regular computer

If mobile experiences impact consumers’ willingness to interact with companies at large, we can’t think of mobile as simply another channel. It is part of the communication landscape at large. It is not about developing mobile campaigns, it is about facilitating users ability to get the information they need at their convenience.

Thus, not only do optimizing mobile email and optimizing the mobile web go hand in hand, but both of these go hand in hand with optimizing our traditional email and web experiences as well. It’s all connected.

Take a look at the full report Why the Mobile Web is Disappointing End-Users.

Live Blog: Financial Services Solution Showcase

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

We've got quite a change of pace in the ol' developer track conference room. Chris Murray of ExactTarget is the emcee for the Financial Services Solution Showcase.

He starts by introducing the first segment:

Beyond Deliverability: Consumer Choice & Control
Authentication, Privacy, and Policy
by Craig Spiezle
https://otalliance.org

The Online Trust Alliance is concerned with security in online activity, especially financial services. Spoofed email, phishing, and online exploits are a major challenge for financial organizations that operate online.

Craig said that government regulations are likely to come about in the next few weeks as a result of the identity theft incidents that we've heard of recently. Craig said that the United States is actually behind other parts of the world in consumer production.

Craig discussed extended validation certificates. In order to get one of these certificates, the business must prove that it's registered with a local tax authority. While this can't verify that the business has good business practices, but it does require that the business be a real business. When a business has this certificate, it turns the address bar in your browser green when you visit their site. If the address bar isn't green, you know that it's a spoofed site.

He continued to talk about the business value of authentication. Not only does this help protect your business from being spoofed, but also improves your deliverability.

Of the top 100 financial institutions in North America, only 43% have protections in place for consumers.

Craig talked about the problem with unsubscribe: an unsubscribe link in the footer of the email is required by CAN-SPAM, but consumers are warned not to click links in emails they don't want for fear that they'll alert spammers that they're a real person. An unsubscribe header allow ISPs to render an unsubscribe link in their client so that people can unsubscribe without clicking the "report as spam" link and degrading your reputation. About this time, someone from ExactTarget piped up to mention that ExactTarget email already does this automatically.

Addressing Email Security Concerns
Matt Burton - GMAC/Ally Bank

Matt talked about Ally bank and the fact that its customers were receiving more spoof emails that were pretending to be from Ally as they were receiving from the real bank.

Ally Bank, like many places, would love for there to be a "silver bullet" that would solve the problem, but in fact the best way to protect consumers is with a combination of proactive monitoring, excellent deliverability of your legit content, and customer education.

Governance, while unpopular, is critical. If your company has multiple business units, ALL of them have to have successful security.

Some financial institutions do not include links in their emails, instead telling consumers to go to the website. This is problematic because it requires more copy and results in fewer site hits. Also, this doesn't prevent phishing emails from including links in their emails.

Security tools, such as ISP Phish Blocking and Certified Mail, are available to help prevent risk and increase confidence in your message respectively.

Education of consumers can be tricky. Sending emails that tells customers how to tell whether your email is real might make it look like you're a spoofer trying to set them up to trust fraudulent email in the future. Better to just remain consistent in your sending so that consumers become accustomed to your style and learn to identify spoofs on their own.

To wrap up, Matt recommended proactive risk diminuation rather than waiting for a problem happens and only responding then.

Technology Solution
e-statements at Nationwide
Brian Jaffe - Nationwide Insurance

Nationwide was facing a "statement challenge"--sending statements to customers on email. The address this issue, they created an elegant solution.

Governance - As part of this process, they codified their program for sending emails.
Preference management - allow customers to specify their preferences. Brian recommends double opt in.
Billing format - recreate view of paper statement
Send mode - bulk or single send. You probably batch up your bills, but some might do individual sends.
Data preparation - attributes or data extensions? what is the unique subscriber key? You need to understand your extremes (what happens if you have an extremely large amount of data?) and your data-display issues.
Deliverability - decisions about IP and Domain. Learn from your deliverability team!
Feedback - decisions about bounce management, reply management. If people unsubscribe and then try to sign up, you could have technical problems sending emails. Make sure you understand how your unsubscribes are managed. And be ready to monitor replies, even if you tell people not to reply to a message.
Inserting marketing messages into transactional emails - CAN-SPAM does allow you include marketing messages into your transactional emails under certain circumstances.

Paperless statements can create issues. For example, what if customers call in saying that they never received their statement. Customer service needs to be able to access tracking to see whether the subscriber ever opened the email and have other strategies to deal with these complaints. Customer service needs to be able to resend statements.

Nationwide includes quite a bit of personal information in their emails so that subscribers know that the email must be legit, since a phishing scam wouldn't have access to so much personal information. Watch out for links to log-in pages, since phishing emails like to send very similar emails that direct to their own "login page."

Having a protocol to deal with bounces is wise. In their case, if a subscriber soft-bounces, they put the subscriber back into the paper stream for one cycle and try paperless again for the next cycle. If they run into a hard-bounce, they put the subscriber back into the paper stream indefinitely until the subscriber re-enrolls themselves in the paperless process.

Nationwide's solution is based on the ExactTarget SOAP API. Their OMS (outbound messaging service) is a middleware layer of abstraction that actually sits behind their firewall. Between the OMS and ExactTarget much communication occurs to get the statements out to subscribers.

The content of the eStatement itself uses AMPscript to build the bill by parsing concatenated attributes and dynamically displaying content in appropriate data tables.

Michael Murdza (ExactTarget) took us through the technical aspect of the eStatement data flow. A sophisticated decision tree weave through the Nationwide database and ExactTarget application, using XML, AMPscript, and API calls.

And then the presentation wrapped up, and everyone started getting ready for the evening entertainment. I've really enjoyed live blogging the technology track for everyone today, and I hope you've enjoyed reading as much as I've enjoyed writing it. See you between the lines :)

Mobile Developers Solution Showcase

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

Ratul Shah is the presenter for the first part of the solution showcase. Unlike every other presenter that's talked in this room so far today, Ratul is maneuvering through the crowd with the hand-held mic. What a showman. :)

Industry Standard Terms

SMS = short message service, aka text messaging. It has a 160 character limit.
MO = mobile originated = a message sent FROM a phone
MT = mobile terminated = a message sent TO a phone
short code = a 5- or 6-digit number that you buy from a carrier to send messages to your customers. http://www.usshortcodes.com
vanity short code = a short code that spells something out, such as our, ETSMS
random short code = a short code that doesn't intentionally spell anything. These cost slightly less.
private short code = only your traffic goes through this code
shared short code = a code that you share with other SMS users. Keywords differentiate your traffic from the traffic of other people on the shared short codes.
MMA = Mobile Marketing Association http://mmaglobal.com/policies. A group that creates guidelines for United States mobile marketing.
Aggregator = a third party company that maintains connections between the carriers and the content providers. When we provisioning a short code for you, we work with an aggregator to get you approved for all carriers.

ExactTarget SMS Architecture
You create JOIN, VOTE, HELP, UNSUBSCRIBE and other kinds of actions that subscribers use to send you MO messages to get in on your mobile messages.

Unfortunately, you can't create keywords or actions in the API at this point. You can initiate SMS sends through the API, however.

System Terms

Subscriber key = unique identifier for subscribers. Allows you to identify subscribers by phone number instead of email address.
Publication list = contains subscribers who opt-in using their mobile device
Data extension = contains subscribers whom you import through the GUI or the API

Implementing Text

Keyword response - text in and receive a response
Mobile capture - captures email address for list growth
Vote and check vote count - submit your vote. poll the response
Outbound (with opt-in) - a message from ExactTarget to the mobile device
Custom campaigns

Wow, Ratul goes through a lot of content fast, and a lot of these slides are very graphics heavy and difficult to translate to blog. Thankfully, everyone at the conference is supposed to be able to get the slides.

FanMail Solution

Dave DeVore - CEO FanMail marketing
Josiah Kaiser - Senior Operations and Solutions Consultant
Tim Kauble - ExactTarget product specialist and world-class AMPscript guru

FanMail Marketing is using SMS to capture email addresses. Initially they were asking subscriber to text their email addresses in this format:

krohn email@example.com to 88769

but they found that customers found this confusing and made errors that prevented the system from capturing their information. So for the next phase, they made it into a 2-stage process to make it more like a conversation. In the new setup, subscribers text in in this format:

stubbs to 88769

then the system sends back an text saying something to the effect of, "Thanks for your interest. Reply to this message with your email address to join our mailing list." When the subscriber responds with the email address, it is added to the email list. The customer gets an email immediately welcoming them to the list, and then any future mailings to that list.

The SMS message that was sent back after the first message included AMPscript to trigger the welcome email.

The first use case resulted in more errors than the second, and people weren't willing to try to sign up more than once. A limitation of both use cases is that it only captures people's email addresses, omitting other important subscriber information that would be useful for relevant messaging .

In the third phase of FanMail's SMS evolution, they integrated their SMS with landing pages to allow the capture of more subscriber information. People text in:

butter to 88769

The system responds with a message saying to respond with an email address. When the subscriber replies with the email address, the system sends them an email with a link to a landing page built with the Smart Capture feature. People complete the Smart Capture form and now the system has information to send really personalized information. For example, this band (Hot Buttered Rum) uses the subscriber's ZIP code to let the subscriber know about upcoming concerts in their area.

What FanMail discovered was that going through this process aggregated higher quality subscribers who were more likely to be engaged with the marketing campaigns and therefore higher ROI on their marketing efforts.

The future phases of this SMS evolution may allow subscriber to provide attribute information via SMS, such as ZIP code to empower the functionality above.

Another thing that FanMail has discovered is that subscribers are willing to send you SMS messages if they're interested in what you have to offer, but they don't like for you to begin the SMS conversation.

Custom Use Case
Tim Kauble took the stage for the final portion of this presentation. Poor Tim--his phone junked out on him this morning and his data connection didn't work, so we're seeing a modified version of his presentation. Typical of technology!

Tim talked about designing a system to allow him to manage his own tasks using text messages. He wanted to accomplish the following:

Accept tasks
Assign those tasks
Assign priority, including deadlines
Expose the tasks to landing pages so that he could see them all
Support multiple methods of input, such a forwarding emails to an endpoint that generates a task with the content of the email.

Tim demonstrated texting in to the system to find out how many tasks he had. He had 30, by the way, plus the system also sent him a message to stop messing around with text messages and get back to work. :)

Tim also brought up the landing page where we could see his lengthy task list--such is the life of the ExactTarget employee!

Live Blog: SMS Text Messaging for Marketers Helps Increase Subscriber Engagement

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Berkey

Today at Connections 2009, I spoke on an industry panel about how SMS Text Messaging fits into the one-to-one marketing campaigns. We had four customers on the panel share their mature SMS marketing strategies. Hearing from the US Navy, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Pier 1 Imports, and Hyperdrive Interactive, the attendees heard one common element throughout each story. In every case, text messages were used to improve subscriber engagement, marked with explicit permission.

The reason why SMS mobile marketing is so successful is because people always have their mobile phones with them, but they may not have their computers handy. People don't leave home without their mobile phones. And as marketers are looking for ways to set themselves apart in the marketplace, SMS mobile marketing can help give them an edge.

Based on the 2009 Channel Preference Study whitepaper, consumers surveyed say they want to receive SMS mobile messages with expressed permission for companies to send transactional messages, time-sensitive alerts such as flight notifications, and operational alerts such as banking messages for suspicious account activities. The key learning for marketers to is understand which messaging channel their subscribers prefer for different types of messages.

A best practice to solve this challenge is to collect your subscriber's preference for marketing channels they prefer for various message types in the future. For marketers considering SMS text messaging, the first step is supporting inbound Text to capture new subscribers to your future drip marketing campaigns.

Capitalizing on real-time interest when you have prospects' attention at a live event or retail location, gives the marketer new possibilities. Seasoned marketers know that offering incentives to potential texters helps drive people to participate in these new campaigns.

When Pier 1 launched their first SMS campaign they captured new subscribers in a younger demographic for future email marketing campaigns. Subsequent drip marketing emails featured a message with a youthful tone and unique offers to help drive conversion. Read more from their story in Mobile Marketer. Texters were incented to engage in order to enter the sweepstakes to win a free Pier 1 Papasan Chair.

Text messaging is all over Connections this year, powered by ExactTarget Text. Check out SMS marketing program examples.

Live Blog: Best Practices for Utilizing ExactTarget's SOAP APIs

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

We've got a rather thin crowd for the Best Practices for Utilizing ExactTarget's SOAP APIs session. Apparently everyone is already implementing the API in the best possible way...or think they are :)

Manager of the Product Specialist department Dale McCrory returns to the stage for this presentation and starts the session by asking people what topics they would like to see covered today. The first question was on documentation.

YAY! I love when people care about the documentation!

Web Service API Documentation
Dale brings up http://wiki.memberlandingpages.com to demonstrate all of the wonderful web service API documentation that's available there. He takes the group through a technical article on asynchronous processing, the CREATE method, an object, and a property. Bryan Wade, the embedded expert at ExactTarget and emcee of the session, asks how many people in the room have been to the wiki before, and about half of the room had already visited. I think the rest will visit before too long.

Content Management
The second question is about content management and best practices for it. Dale pulls up the AMPscript page in the documentation wiki to find the HTTPGet() function. This function performs a get call against a URL and brings back the content. This tool can be used to interact with an outside system in include the content in the emails.

AMPscript also support XSLT now, so you can interact with ExactTarget with you XML content. The BuildRowSetFromXML() function extends this capability.

Slide Presentation
With the two questions addressed, Bryan prods Dale to get back to the slideshow. The slides cover:

Security
Reliability
Robustness
Flexibility
Messaging content
Stats retrieval - tracking events

Security
Standards-based SOAP security to support authentication

All calls transmit over an SSL connection. The API supports two forms of security:

Plain text username token. This is what everyone's using right now.
X509 certificate encryption for the username token will be available in the 135 release.

.NET, Java, and PHP work the best with our security. Perl is OK. Ruby, ColdFusion, and ASP have troubles dealing with it because they don't deal well with the standards-based security.

Reliability
In this section, we're talking about synchronous versus asynchronous API processing again. Asynchronous processing adds all calls to a queue to be processed when the system is ready, which prevents API calls from being lost if the server is unavailable for any reason.

Other benefits include:

The fact that you get a sub-second response to the fact that the call has been received.
You have multiple options to receive results: HTTP post, Email, and the RETRIEVE API call.
The ConversationID concept that's used with asynch API processing allows you to resend the same call without worrying that it will actually be processed twice if the system had already queued the request.

Question from the floor: sounds like we need to improve our XML API documentation. That product hasn't been enhanced for quite a while, so the doc has gotten a little stale. There's an item for my to-do list.

Robustness
Dale quotes Wikipedia: "Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses, pressures, or changes in procedure or circumstance."

Triggered sends represent the quickest way to get an email sent from the ExactTarget system. Key points help decide whether to use user-initiated (list-based) sends or triggered sends:

How do you want to aggregate tracking?
List based sends aggregate tracking by job. Triggered sends aggregate tracking over a time period when the triggered send was running.
How will email content be made available to the ExactTarget system?
How are unsubscribes managed?
List based sends record unsubs at the list level, or at the All Subscribers level. If a person unsubscribes from a triggered send, they can be unsubscribed from all triggered sends.
How large are your lists?
If you have 1.5 million subscribers, you should start with list based. If you are sending individual messages in response to customer activity, triggered sends are the way to go.

You can keep your subscriber information in lists or data extensions. To help you decide:

Are attribute sets going to be the same for all sends?
If so, you can use lists because you set up attributes for all lists together. If you need different attribute sets for different subsets of clients, then you want data extensions.
Is import performance critical?
If you have 1.5 million subscribers to import, you can import them into a data extension in 10 minutes versus 1-2 hours for a list (this is an approximation...the number of attributes has a big effect on performance as well).
How will unsubscribes be managed?
Each list maintains its own unsubscribes. Data extensions maintain unsubscribes in publication lists.
Bonus point not in the slide: if you are a partner building an application, you probably want to build on lists if possible, because they cost less.

Flexibility
This topic starts with a discussion of data extensions. Data extension are

The only way to use the API to do "rich" queries of data
The way you can add relational models of data en masse or row-by-row
Very fast
Tables in our database schema that are specific to your account

The DataExtension WS API object

Allows the use of upsert
Ties to the DataExtension by CustomerKey (called "external key" in the GUI)
Allows specification of Keys and Nulls
There's also a DataExtensionObject that you can retrieve to bring back a row in the data extension.

Messaging Content
Email, images, and files, oh my!

Text-only email will be supported with 135, in addition to the HTML and HTML/Text multi-part formats.

The Portfolio object allows you to host files in ExactTarget. Images and files that you import into our system are hosted by Akamai, so when people hit these files, they are highly available and don't use your company's bandwidth.

Using AMPscript, you can attach files to your email, but you should use this feature with caution. There's a page for the documentation that's going to be published very soon that talks about best practices for attachments so that you can protect your deliverability while using this feature.

Stats Retrieval and Tracking Events
We ran out of time for the stats retrieval, so we went straight to question and answer, which went by too fast for me to keep up, especially while I"m still on this documentation cloud. :)

Live Blog: Email+Video - Take 2

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Kevin Nuest

This is a live blog from Connections 09 in the Email Optimization Track

Email is not dead. People that use social media are actually high volume users of email.

History of email:
(present by Chris Studabaker of ExactTarget)
Text Based only 10 years ago
HTML is now being accented by Rich Media and Video

Advertisers continue to increase spending in online video. All the more reason to use video in email.

How and When to use video in email

Benefits:
-Emotion
-Highly engaging
-Personal, even user-generated
-Great demonstration medium (show, don’t tell)

Concerns:
-Development cost and time
-Production quality and the “uncanny valley”
-File size and bandwidth
-Frame rates
-Deliverability

Deliverability methods:
Streaming – video downloaded as it plays
Embedded – video data included in sent message
Linking – click through to externally hosted video

When using video in email, make sure your subscribers want to see the video you have. Knowing your subscribers’ expectations is very important. Also, remember the messages primary goal. Is the video the Call to Action or do you want your subscribers to click on something else in the email?

Linking with Button or Image?
Do you link to your video with a graphic button, a clip of the video with a play button superimposed, or a rotating animated gif with multiple clips from the video. It depends on your subscribers. Experiment with all three. One type may drive more total clicks but another may drive more conversions.

Streaming Video in Email:
(Peter Horan of GoodMail)

GoodMail is a CertifiedEmail partner with many ISPs so messages sent don’t end up in the spam filter.

CertifiedVideo will create an interactive experience via email.

Every time you ask a subscriber to do one more step, you loose some of them. If a subscriber has to click to turn on images in their emails, they may not view your email.

Daily Candy currently sends CertifiedVideo in their email.

Fandango also includes movie trailers inside their video, not just a static button that a subscriber has to click to see the video.

Target includes essentially video commercials inside their emails to represent their products and brand.

Thrillist allowed Canon to sponsor a video displaying a new camera inside one of their emails.

The Effects of including video in email:
Increases Brand awareness in important categories, such as increasing how Target is perceived as caring for their customers.

CertifiedVideo emails currently only works on web-based email, such as AOL, Yahoo, and Gmail, but not Outlook.

Brought to you LIVE: ExactTarget’s API Vision and Roadmap - Past, Present, and Future

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Caitilin Landrigan

10:58 am So excited! The ExactTarget API enables the extension of our software and some incredible functionality. Scott McCorkle is going to be speaking, along with Michael Ciancio-Bunch. They have some incredible insight. I am not technical, so I’ll do my best to convey the information presented here.

11:01 am Bryan Wade is introducing Michael Cianco-Bunch and Scott McCorkle. McCorkle is speaking about our dedication to integration, improving our user experience, and how the API is key with CARBON-check it out online!

11:03 am Michael is on. We are a young company, but our API has a history. XML API (2002) was created originally only for content management. A bulk Asynchronous API was introduced in 2004. Our SOAP API was launched in 2007—this is the foundation for our web services …

11:05 am … and actually, the Asynchronous Web Service API became available in 2008. It seems that not many people are using it right now. Its advantages include quicker calls, better status reporting, and correlating conversation IDs. Start using!

11:07 am First thing we did in 2009 was support compression…coming your way in a release! We’re also beta testing API streaming, which helps with large packets.

11: 09 am Bryan Wade is highlighting current functionality.

11: 10 am Michael is focusing in on streaming sends: we can send as we receive via the API, with triggered sends for example, instead of waiting until a certain number are received before sending.

11:11 am Did you know API calls are up 1.5x from last year? “This amount of use is a testament to the fact that the API is now better. More people are able to use it.”-Michael.

11:13 am What does the future of the API look like? The API is a platform to help customers and partners to integrate. Michael is saying that there are a number of tools that allow us to integrate, extend, and embed ExactTarget. These tools support functions not possible with just the API. Here are a few of the tools: Programs, landing pages, AMPscript … the list goes on.

11:15 am There was a huge “Hoorah!” from someone when Michael announced the introduction of a REST API. File based API and Authenticated Asynchronous API Results Callbacks are on the horizon as well.

11:17 am A user is asking about tracking a file that is sent with new API functionality … You could give the file a conversation or correlation ID so you don’t have to worry about re-using file names.

11:18 am Why is the Authenticated Asynchronous API Results Callback so great? You don’t have to fish for errors with queries! BIG question…what is the timeline for delivering these advancements? … Next year! Be on the lookout!

11:19 am We’re changing topics to landing pages and their use for creating Profile Centers, subscriber capture, and promotion pages. The beauty of landing pages is that they extend the user interface and can be integrated with ET.

11:23 am More on landing pages! You can embed them within your application. Sign-up forms are an example.

11:25 am ExactTarget’s API roadmap … One set of items is pre-built templates “encapsulating some application function (e.g. Send Wizard, Data Extensions, etc).” … There is so much more information to convey here …. Trying to get it all down!

11:26 am Java will be supported on landing pages. This is great news!

11:27 am “AMPscript is the future!” says Michael … just kidding … Java is going to eventually replace it. ExactTarget also wants to introduce JavaScript activities like data transformation and user defined functions. There is a lot on this roadmap! It is clear that ET is truly focusing on product development.

11:30 am Looking now at Data Integration … We want users to be able to import from external systems and export to them as well. Data cleansing is also on the horizon, in addition to a number of other functionalities to help users integrate data. We have our sight on breaking down barriers that keep us from being an open platform.

11:34 am Again, we have a lot of information here! I strongly recommend reaching out to some of our developers while you are here.

UI Extensibility: even more features are coming. As a user, you will have the ability to define a custom home page, add buttons, add tabs to our toolbars, and add custom fields to forms. McCorkle talked about building a user experience in our user interface. What a concept! It will allow a great degree of customization in each user’s account.

11:38 am The Program feature is going to be further developed as well. Whoa - EXCITING: templates will also be available for programs. For example, there will be a template for a birthday program in the user interface. This functionality will be extremely helpful for marketers and programmers with limited resources.

11:41 am Question time! Yes folks, the API is almost too good to be true … and yet it is!

11:43 am Now we’re talking about Enterprise 2.0. With the API you can do things in the application “on behalf” of users without exceeding their permissions. You will also be able to access objects in multiple business units via the API in 2.0.

11:49 am And in closing…share your ideas! Let ExactTarget know how, as a developer, we can improve 3sixty for your use. Quite a few people in the crowd here use 3sixty and some of those are members of the Developer Community. This community needs to be more active. We have deliver 100+ ideas on 3sixty so far…let your voice be heard!

Coming to you live from Connections ’09! Enjoy the rest of the conference!

Live Blog: ExactTarget's API Vision and Roadmap - Past, Present, and Future

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

As we wait to hear about the future of the ExactTarget API, 3 Par handed out a card inviting everyone to come by their booth in the vendor hall to register to win a Nintendo Wii. Too bad ExactTarget employees aren't eligible to win. :)

I can see the presenters setting up at the front of the room, and they aren't messing around with the expertise that they're bringing to the table. Our chief architect, Michael Ciancio-Bunch (known to his friends as MCB) and our CTO, Scott McCorkle are on the stage.

ExactTarget API: Past, Present, and Future
Scott begins the discussion by talking about how the Carbon initiative will lead the application to consume our own web service API. This "eating our own dog food" will ensure that the API has the entire breadth of functionality of the application.

MCB launched into the history of the API:

2002 - XML API was introduced
2004 - Bulk asynch API was introduced
2007 - Object Oriented Web Service API
2008 - Asynchronous web service API

Michael asked how many people were using the asynch WS API, but no one was, which inspired him to go into the benefits of the asynchronous model. It takes advantage of our multiple data centers to make sure that API calls are processed, allows you to indicate the order of API calls, and prevents accidental re-processing of the same calls.

Then Michael began talking about the features delivered or planned for 2009.

DISCLAIMER: all forward looking statements are subject to change. As MCB said, "we might have another John and Kate mess" and the distraction would push out development timelines.

Back to the list:

Support for compression (currently limited availability)
Streaming (in the works) - begins processing the "conversation" (collection of calls) before all of the content is received.
X.509 user authentication (in the works)
API exposed via AMPscript (already delivered)
Enterprise 2.0 user model - create roles, permissions, business units, etc. (scheduled for November release)
Retrieve improvements
Round out - things like template support and more capability to manipulate content areas

Currently, ExactTarget is processing 58 calls per second (150,000,000 API calls per month), including 28 triggered sends per second. The capacity and processing power of the ExactTarget infrastructure is truly difficult to conceive. It's like trying to understand how big the moon is or something.

Michael introduced the ExactTarget Platform Integration Framework - a set of tools (much improved over what we've provided in the past) to allow developers to use the web service API to create powerful apps. Here are the tools:

API
Landing Pages
AMPscript
Data integration tools (Import, extracts, and more to come)
Extensible UI
Programs
Enterprise
Packaging and provisioning
Community to support you

API
On the roadmap is:

A proper REST API (to be delivered sometime in 2010)
A file-based API, where you FTP a file that contains instructions and the ExactTarget begins processing those instructions as soon as we receive it (probably to be delivered in the spring)
Authenticated asynch API results callback - the ability for us to call back to you if something goes wrong in a call. Currently, you have to query for status, or have a rudimentary notification. This will be much more sophisticated and slick. (to be delivered sometime in 2010)

Landing Pages
You can use this feature to create customer-facing web pages, but you can also use it to create pages that you see within the ExactTarget application. For example, you could create your own custom wizards or customized data presentation pages. You can build them as landing pages and integrate them into our application for your ExactTarget users to see when they're logged in to the application.

Not only that, but you can embed landing pages within your own application. Landing pages can support AJAX, so you can gather information within your own app and feed it in to ExactTarget.

On the landing page roadmap:

Smart Page templates for common use cases, CSS, and the ability to tap into server and client side events for added customization
JavaScript as a server side language
Highly available landing pages

AMPscript
Michael made a bold statement that JavaScript will kill off AMPscript in the future (though he did suggest that we'd always support it). After that, the discussion became more about the future plans for JavaScript, such as an activity, (those things you can put in programs) for JavaScript.

I understand, but I'll be sad to see AMPscript go by the wayside. It's a really powerful scripting language.

Data Integration Tools
Roadmap items include:

Direct import from and extract to external systems, such as CRM, analytics, POS, etc.
File transformations
Sophisticated mapping functionality
Data cleansing services
Interfaces defined for custom integrations
Richer metadata around data extensions

UI Extensibility
These are some of the roadmap items:

The ability to define a custom home page. I think that this is already available to Enterprise 2.0 edition products.
Buttons can be added to toolbars and tabs can be added to the navigation bar. I've seen this demoed myself, and it's pretty cool. Really allows you to customize the experience.
Custom fields can be added to forms
Experience Builder - this is a really cool one, too. We saw some wireframes for this earlier in the conference, and it's going to be really awesome.

Programs
MCB says we're rewriting the program engine, and the new incarnation will support delays, notifications, and other stuff that's been requested. A programs dashboard and templates, along with better error reporting and error recovery, will make working with programs easier.

The "file drop" functionality that I mentioned earlier is a kind of ad hoc program, plus activities will be created to invoke web services and HTTP based APIs, so the lines between API and programs are getting blurrier, creating a lot more power and flexibility.

Enterprise 2

Granular permission model
Run as functionality for the API - this lets you use the permission level of a user with your API calls, so that tools you build with the API will only show users what's appropriate for them.
Ability to define custom permissions
Access to objects in multiple business units via the API - For example, you could query the records in a data extension in one business unit and write them to a data extension in a different business unit.

Packaging and Provisioning
We'll be allowing you to bundle up all your custom landing pages, data extensions, folder, UI customizations, program templates, and other elements to drop them into another account. This will allow you to do cool things like pre-configure new business unit accounts. Eventually, this idea will support an app-store-type tool where people could browse your package and purchase it and install it.

Community
MCB acknowledged that developers have not been happy with how 3sixty has replaced the old Developer Community. He talked about our dedication to improve the experience. We have developers within ExactTarget to answer questions and post content. He asked that everyone submit their requests for what they'd like to see, because we do want to make it better.

Q&A
Again, documentation is getting the shout out in the question and answer. I guess people actually like to know the technical details. w00t!

Live Blog: Automation Event Triggered Sends Using SOAP API

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

The developer track continues with Automation Event Triggered Sends Using SOAP API.

Between sessions, the intrepid staff of the Westin brought in several more chairs, effectively ensuring that no one will be sitting on the floor this time. There wouldn't be room, even if they wanted to.

Ana Ng plays over the PA system while we wait for the session to start, and with a minute to go it switches to Particle Man as the room fills up. You can tell that we're gearing up for the They Might be Giants concert tonight, after the Second City performance. Indeed, I'm already wearing my wristband :)

Automation Event Triggered Sends Using SOAP API
ExactTarget Product Specialist Manager and general super brain, Dale McCrory beings the presentation by asking how many people in the crowd have used triggered sends before. This feature is one of the most powerfully compelling and commonly implemented functionalities available in the SOAP API. Triggered emails are perfect for things like password reminders, order confirmations, and welcome emails. You can also use them together with Web Collect forms, Reply Mail Management, and other parts of the ExactTarget system that automatically send response emails to subscribers.

He continues by talking about send classifications: marketing and transactional, and the differences between then. Basically, marketing messages are subject to CAN-SPAM regulation, while transactional messages are not, since they're might actually be required to be sent to subscribers, such as receipts.

Dale puts some code up on the screen to show the anatomy of a triggered send call. He talks about how the template, content, and all the look-and-feel stuff about the email are created within the application and are controllable by marketers. The API then references the triggered send definition using the external key and doesn't have to bother with actually creating the content of the email using the API.

Next, Dale moved in to the difference between synchronous and asynchronous API. A synchronous API call goes to the server, which responds. If the server is unavailable, there's no response, and it's on the ExactTarget customer's shoulders to retry. Asynchronous calls, on the other hand, are queued up, so even if they can't be processed right away, they will get processed when the server is available. He recommends that people starting new triggered send initiatives use asynchronous API, unless development is so constrained that synchronous is all there's time for.

High priority API calls can be processed immediately, even if one of the servers is unavailable, by using our multiple data centers. There are limitations on emails that can be sent this way (they can't contain info from data extensions...stuff like that) and it incurs an additional cost per send.

Dale ran a little short of time, but he'll be presenting again later in the day.

Intuit's Notifications Service Engine: A practical approach to facilitating customer notifications
Next Intuit's Gary Rittinger directed everyone to http://connect.intuit.com to check out the implementation that he'll be talking about.

His purpose is to provide Intuit's infrastructure and offerings the ability to send, monitor, and manage the notifications they send to customers in a consistent and reliable way. To do this, Gary uses triggered sends to send welcome emails, order confirmation, shipping conversation, and other transactional messages.

Intuit finds that it's difficult to get consistent programming from across its organization, so it uses "application adapters" to normalize the input. They're using ExactTarget accounts to let each product manager get in and see the status of email sends.

As a result of implementing ExactTarget, Intuit enjoys:

Better transparency into notifications deliverability.
Reduced cost and increased efficiency of customer notifications.
Improved enterprise SOA adoption through standard web service technologies.
Fewer of redundant apps that served the same purpose.
Improve governance and compliance.

Gary recounted the ease and smoothness of putting this process in place. He commented that they've recently been moved from the Indy data center to the Las Vegas data center--one of the first customer to be live sending out of that data center--and the move took only 90 seconds. He also said that rolling out the process took only a couple weeks.

During the Q&A, Bryan Wade (the emcee) is talking up the documentation wiki and the API content that's available on it. This is a topic near and dear to my heart <3

Create, Execute, and Optimize Your One-to-One Marketing.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Kevin Nuest

This is a live blog from the Strategy session at Connections 09

Panelists:
Carrie Jensen of ExactTarget
Dela Quist of Alchemy Worx
Chris Murray of ExactTarget

8:42 - Chris Murray of ExactTarget says “Make Time for Strategy.

8:43 – How to get started:
1.    Where are you now?
2.    Where do you want to go?
3.    How will you get there?

8:44 – Assess, analys, and audit where you are now.

8:45 – Make sure you are focusing on Deliverability and getting into the inbox. If you don’t know where you stand with the ISPs then you are in trouble.

8:46 – Survey your customers and ask them if they think you are sending them emails too often.

8:47 - How sophisticated are you? Are you a batch and blast or do you have a true one-to-one marketing campaign. How relevant are you?

8:49 – Define your goals. Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Timely)

8:50 – Solidify the specific segments and targets you are going after. Make sure you communicated with these audiences in their preferred channel.

8:51 – Ask yourself, how do I keep the customers engaged once I have them?

8:53 – On a whiteboard, layout your target segments across the top of the board and develop campaigns down the side that will go to each segment.

8:55 – Don’t forget to look at the “end-to-end.” Make sure the subscribers has a cohesive experience from the time you obtain them as a subscriber all the way through their life cycle.

8:56 – Dela says that he faces the same problem you do, “No matter how hard you try and what you do, numbers always seem to be going down.”

9:00 – You are looking at the wrong metrics. Opens and clicks are the final score but has nothing to do with the customers.

9:01 – Dela looks at open reach. At the end of a campaign, if a subscriber opens at least one email then they are counted in the open reach.

9:02 – Also track the frequency that subscribers are interacting with your campaigns.

9:03 – Open reach and open rate tactics and strategy are very different.

9:04 – Let you subscribers know what is coming next in your campaign. If you are going to send them a spring email, let them know so they can begin to anticipate it.

9:06 – In 12 months there are over 73,000 ways a subscriber can interact with your campaign. For each email, a subscriber can open an email, not open, open once, click…

9:09 – Don’t compare yourself to the Amazons of the world. Don’t beat yourself up trying to get the same level of customer interaction from your emails as Amazon has had success doing.

Live Blog: Advanced Dynamic Messaging and Smart Capture

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Amanda Cross

The Developer Track is packed this morning to see Advanced Dynamic Messaging and Smart Capture. The room looks like it seats about 100, and all the seats are full with several standing or sitting (like me--tough to type while standing!) around the perimeter of the room.

Centric Consulting
The presentation begin with Centric Consulting talking about its extensive experience using the advanced ExactTarget tools. As I type this, Dave Lemons from Centric Consulting is introducing the basic terms: microsites, data extensions, AMPscript...stuff like that. Bryan Wade, ExactTarget embedded expert and emcee of the event, has been interjecting as well, probably trying to help bring the sophisticated technical content to the attendees, who are certainly of various levels of technical experience, especially with the ExactTarget tools.

Centric has built a landing page that displays the results of a query activity on a data extension. Centric is a third-party developer, and the functionality that they're displaying here is not just an example of what other people can also do, but could eventually become the kind of app that we've been talking about all conference long that could be made available to ExactTarget customers everywhere.

Best Buy
Eric Brousseasu, Best Buy
Jim Murphey, technology solutions manager

The second part of the session is a case study of some of the cool things that Best Buy has implemented.

Eric and Jim started the presentation basic with their dynamic content that they're using in their emails. The dynamic content is based on attributes in a data extension, so it sounds like they're basing dynamic content on more than just subscriber attributes. They're also including AMPscript in the emails for simple things like proper capitalization as well as for building rowsets to include the message. You can do things like include a purchase history using this functionality. I think that in this case they're sending emails to alert customers when a product comes back in stock.

As they moved in to the advanced dynamic content discussion, they talk about using Content Syndication ("screen scrape," as it's called in the vernacular) to grab content from their website to include in the email. It sounds like they're transforming the XML from the site using AMPscript before including it in the body of the message. By combining the subscriber's wish list content (from the website) with the emails, they're creating truly personalized, truly 1-to-1 communication. This is a really cool implementation.

They were running out of time for the last part of their talk, so we rushed through the delayed surveys (the "how was the shopping experience" email that came out a few days after the purchase, the ability of customers to cancel their own orders through the website, and the ability to see which SKUs were selling best--all using the ExactTarget application.

A very cool presentation with some very cool functionality. Also very cool: now the people are filing out and I get can a seat. Maybe my foot won't be asleep for the whole day after all!

Connections 09: More Subscribers Rule

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 by Shelly Griffin

This morning I am attending Connections 09 breakout session focused on growing your email marketing subscriber base with Morgan Stewart serving as commentator. This concept is a great follow-up to my recent posts on how to grow your email marketing list.

8:30am - 50% of consumers consider non-permission email from companies that they are familiar with as Spam...that number has doubled year over year.

8:45am - what are they keys to growing your subscriber base? Asking basic questions of your subscribers...do they want to receive email from you and what kind of email do they want to receive? Then what? Make sure you have a strong follow-up after registration. Don't leave your subscribers hanging.

9:00am - Email and social networking...building stronger relationships through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. You can offer exclusive discounts through these networks to drive subscribers to your email list. Ensure that the process is a closed loop...getting subscribers to a landing page with good creative and a good call to action and then getting the data you need to be able to market to that subscriber. Knowing the source from where your subscribers some...whether from co-registration pages, social networks, referrals (forward-to-a-friend). Between the source and the data, you can drive the right message to each subscriber and stop "marketing to the masses".

9:10am - List append is "bad"...it may make you money but you just left the taste of spam in your subscribers mouth.

9:15am - the number of tactics and touch-points that can be used to grow ur subscriber list can and should be many...your subscribers are not just sitting at their computers looking through the internet. They are on the go, so you need to be where they are - mobile, Facebook, Twitter, print - everywhere.

World's Largest... AGAIN!

Friday, October 9, 2009 by Scott Dorsey

Connections has sold out AGAIN this year with a record 1,300 marketers from around the globe scheduled to attend the three-day conference. We’ve built a blockbuster lineup of talent to provide insight and information including three-time New York Times bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell, academy-award winning actress Marlee Matlin and industry thought leaders hosting nearly 30 interactive breakout sessions ranging from e-marketing best practices to building multi-channel marketing campaigns.

Connections always creates great opportunities to connect with the world’s best marketers, and I expect this year to be better than ever. I look forward to seeing you in Indianapolis next week.

The Rise of Emperor Engagement

Friday, October 9, 2009 by Al Iverson

If Permission is King, then Engagement is the Emperor, my esteemed coworker Karen Balle explained to me this morning. And she's right.

Engagement (or lack of engagement) seems to be causing a lot of bulk foldering issues lately. If your mail is going to the bulk folder at a top ISP, it's probably going to be because recipients don't care about your email. They're not engaged.

What is engagement? I could break it down, but why re-invent the wheel? George Bilbrey provided a nicely detailed breakdown of engagement metrics, how they work, and what ISPs do with them.

To me, this highlights yet again that an email address isn't forever. Keep mailing somebody forever, or send them irrelevant messaging, and they're going to get bored with you. (Even if they had opted in!) Your open and click rates drop off significantly, and ISPs pick up on that. They will denote that most of the subscribers don't care, that recipients never read the email you send. And that means that the ISP isn't going to feel compelled to ensure that mail goes to the inbox. If the recipients don't care, the ISP isn't going to care either.

George points out that engagement isn't a new thing, but I would counter that engagement is now a much bigger deal than it was, say, two years ago. Or go back even further, to the days where a single spam complaint would get you blocked. You'd protect against it with double opt-in, and the ISP would keep the gates open for you. Now, permission isn't enough; you have to make sure what you're sending is wanted by recipients.

Of course, reputation still matters significantly, as do all the things that have historically gone into reputation metrics, most importantly, permission. Chip House and I will touch on reputation and engagement, along with a panel of experts, next week at our Connections '09 Conference.

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